It was Monday, October 17th, 1988.

I was leaving for New York in the morning. 

Who could sleep?

Well, not just from excitement.  Nosirreebob.  I had to work – the trip was going to pretty well clean me out.  I spent a dreary Monday night out at City Limits, spinning records to almost nobody.  By 10PM, it was just me, the bartender, the “bouncer” (a guy who was all of 5’5 and 130 pounds and who’d never actually stopped a fight in all the nights I’d worked with him) and the waitress, who spent most of her time over in the bowling alley, schlepping beers to the few duffers rolling desultory balls down the lanes. 

And that was OK; my mind was all focused on the next day anyway; picturing the city; visualizing my way between stops on subway routes and intersections I’d long memorized; most of all, visualizing myself getting one of the jobs on my slate over the next week.  I pictured the studios; I envisioned myself behind the mike, taking my first caller (“Gino from Bensonhurst”, I figured), finding a place to live, grabbing a bagel in the morning on my way to, or from, work; the lights at night; Broadway; the Hudson, the WTC, CBGB; hopping the train to Asbury Park to hobnob with Bruce and Steve and Joe at the Stone Pony; meeting a neurotic Italian girl from Brooklyn named Angela with big Jersey-Girl hair and a black leather skirt and an accent that’d set your teeth on edge and who could probably beat me up, but wouldn’t want to…

…well, the daydreaming was always the same.

The bartender decided to close up early that night.  I drove home, the long, lonely, dark, winding path up Highway Three back to Saint Paul, across the Lafayette Bridge, looking at the riot of lights on downtown’s seemier side, practicing my delivery.

“Yehuda in the Village – you’re up”. 

In my mind, Yehuda was completely batspittle crazy.

“Yehuda, take your medication and call me next week.  Maria in Jersey City, you’re on…”

I came off the bridge and drove past the Savoy, up Tedesco street and around the corner to the tumbledown house on the narrow Swede Hollow street lined with houses that had seen their salad days when Coolidge was president.  I parked, and walked up the sidewalk. 

I heard music as I walked in the door.  There were half a dozen people in the living room; Wyatt, Shane, two guys I’d never met who had the shifty eyes and puffy demeanor of  bar-room drug dealers, and a couple of young women. 

“Miiiitch”, said Wyatt, sloshed and smelling like pot smoke.  “This is Amanda and Carol!  Have some pizza!” he yelled too enthusiastically, pointing toward three Dominos boxes on the table.   

“Hey”, said Ashley, a strikingly attractive, petite blonde with a pixie hairdo, wearing a short black skirt and strappy FM pumps.  Her friend Carol – ruddy-faced, with long, straight hair, dressed in a bright maroon blouse and a gray skirt, like a legal secretary except for a garish necklace – was lolling on the couch, seemingly oblivious. 

“Hi”.  I was hungry.  I grabbed a slice.  “So…how do you know Wyatt?”

Ashley smiled.  “Wyatt lets me into the bar”.

“Ah.  So you’re…”

“I’m a senior at Cretin!” she said, laughing. 

“And her fake ID wouldn’t fool anyone!” Wyatt chortled with gusto, like…well, like a drunk. 

“Huh”, I said. 

Hard to follow up on that.  I stood there, holding the slice of pizza, nodding my head at the conversation around me…

…until I felt something tugging at my slice of pizza.

Carol had crawled over to me on her hands and knees, and was chewing on the pointy end of my slice of pizza. 

“Er…would you like…” I started, and noticed she probably wasn’t getting a word I was saying.  Hammered, high, whatever.  I guided her back to the couch, gave her the slice, and retired to my room.

I had packed everything I needed earlier in the day.  I was ready to go.

Boy, was I.

I’ve got a bit of a first to report.

We’ll get back to that in a moment, here.

Jake Mohan has a piece in the Utne Reader about conservatives bicyclists…

…which was a concept that took a bit for Mr. Mohan to wrap his brain around:

But eventually a few needling questions penetrated my insulated sphere of thought: What if there are conservatives who ride bikes? What the hell do they look like? And where can I find them?

On the Internet, of course.

“I am a gun-owning, low-taxes, small-government, strong military, anti-baby murder, pro-big/small business, anti-social program, conservative Democrat,” wrote Maddyfish, a poster on Bike Forums, an Internet discussion forum where everyone from the casual hobbyist to the obsessive gearhead can discuss all things bike-related, from frame sizes to the best routes downtown. There are dozens such forums for bicyclists and I recently crashed three of them—Bike Forums, MPLS BikeLove, and Road Bike Review—with a simple question: Are there any conservative cyclists out there? Maddyfish (an online pseudonym) was one of the first to reply: “I find cycling to be a very conservative activity. It saves me money and time.”

And just like that, biking conservatives came out of the cyber-woodwork, offering their own mixtures of bike love and political philosophy.

My parents will be happy to know that I, their conservative Republican black-sheep son, has done the improbable; gotten written up in the Utne, that palimpsest of upper-midwest Liberalism:

Mitch Berg is a conservative talk-radio host whose blog, A Shot in the Dark, is divided between political content and chronicles if his experiences commuting by bicycle [Well – among a few other things – Ed.]. “I grew up in rural North Dakota, and biking was one of my escapes when I was in high school and college,” he told me. “It’s my favorite way to try to stay in shape. And if gas fell to 25 cents a gallon, I’d still bike every day.”

Berg doesn’t believe there’s anything inherently political about riding a bike. “But people on both sides of the political aisle do ascribe political significance to biking. The lifestyle-statement bikers, of course, see the act as a political and social statement. And there’s a certain strain of conservatism that sees conspicuous consumption—driving an SUV and chortling at paying more for gas—as a way to poke a finger in the eyes of the environmental left.”

Mohan and I had quite an exchange; read it at your leisure.  The piece covers a lot of ground – most notably, the non-biking conservatives:

Conservative cyclists don’t tend to get help from all their political allies, however. Some right-wing personalities know that biking is a hot-button issue and make pointed attacks on cyclists while reinforcing the liberal-cyclist stereotype. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s hard-right columnist Katherine Kersten earned the ire of the Twin Cities bike community in 2007 when she characterized Critical Mass as a mob of “serial lawbreakers” bent on ruining the lives of honorable citizen motorists. “Are you rushing to catch the last few innings of your son’s baseball game? Trying to get to the show you promised your wife for her birthday? Critical Mass doesn’t give a rip.”

I defended Kersten on that one, of course; I’ve attacked the arrogance of “Critical Mass” in the past.

Last fall, Twin Cities talk-radio host Jason Lewis made on-air remarks decrying the “bicycling crowd” as “just another liberal advocacy group.” He recycled a common anti-bike canard—that bicyclists have no rights to the roads because they don’t pay taxes to service those roads…

…and Lewis is wrong, and I have the property tax statements to prove it.  It’s not our fault that some previous legislature, in its infinite wisdom, chose to tie the state road budget to gasoline taxes which we bikers, largely, don’t use.

We disagree.  That’s nothing new; indeed, it’s stock in trade for conservatives, who do disagree on a lot of things, and still share a party pretty civilly.

Mohan’s conclusion:

Conservatives on bikes represent the breakdown of party-line stereotypes. They are heartening examples of crucial divergences from the lazy red/blue dichotomy the pundits are relentlessly hammering in these last frenzied days of campaign season. They are a microcosm in which a stereotype falls away to reveal an actual individual.

And that, to me, is the important part, not only of Mohan’s piece but a much larger lesson indeed.

Most of the “isms” that have made the past hundred-odd years such a miserable time in the history of the human race – racism, collectivism, Naziism, whatever – trace back to the big one, “We-ism“.  The best way to defend your group’s we-ism is to convince each other that those who are not part of “we” are less intelligent, less coherent, less human than “we” are.

The first step to true hatred is in finding a way to seeing your opponent as something – a set of cliches, stereotypes, abstract evils – other than human.

(Via this guy)

It was Thursday, October 13, 1988. 

My roommate?  Still drugged out of his mind.

Me?  Didn’t care.

As I got ready to go to New York in just a couple of days, I had another couple of contacts to work.

I’d called a station in White Plains, somewhere up north of the Bronx.  The guy sounded like he was seriously trying to manage expectations – “White Plains is the most expensive place in the world to live, and I’m not going to pay a whole lot” was his constant refrain – but he was interested in talking. 

And today, I talked with a guy who was starting up a very interesting talk network proposition.  It was going to be based out of Manhattan, and he sounded thrilled that I was going to be in town to talk.

So I had four appointments for interviews.

The trip was shaping up nicely. 

I worked at Wallaby’s bar in Columbia Heights.  “But not for long“, I thought, a genuine spring coming back to my step for the first time since…

…well, since I could remember.

Four days ’til takeoff.

It was Friday, October 6, 1988.

The previous night, the sleazy DJ service slotted me into a new bar – a Chi-Chi’s on Brooklyn Boulevard at Regent, stuck amid a bunch of car dealerships and apartment buildings.

There were maybe a dozen people in the room – not horrible for a Thursday at a crappy bar, really.  Five of them sat at a table next to the booth – three rough-looking guys and a couple of very drunk twentysomething girls. They were in the mood to dance, anyway.

It was around 9:30, and the five of them were on the floor, lurching clumsily about.  One of the women – whose birthday party the evening was, as it turned out – was shrieking loudly, a little too happy.  It all seemed pretty harmless.  I turned away from the floor to pick my next record.

One of the guys came up to the booth.  “You need to play something you can’t dance to”, he said, sounding urgent, “or you’re going to have one very naked bitch on the floor”.

He seemed to think that was a bad thing.

“OK, well, you might wanna get her to slow down a bit”, I said, paying the guy as much attention as I now pay the kids when they bug me for something dumb.

“I warned you, man”.  He walked away.
“Thanks!”, I called after him, not knowing or caring if he heard me.

I was having a hard time finding my next record; my attention was focused on the bin for about a minute, until a commotion behind me, on the dance floor, caught my attention.

The birthday girl had managed to toss almost all of her clothes in that minute; she was on the floor in her panties, lurching about, trying to peel them off as her friends tried to reason with her – as opposed to, say, keeping her from getting undressed.

I called for a bouncer.

The evening got a lot quieter after that.

———-

Earlier in the week, I’d heard from a friend of a friend that a friend of a friend of his “has a big project starting up”, and that I’d be “perfect for it”.

I called him.

“I’m starting an all-weekend, all-talk radio network”, he said, explaining his business plan.  It’s in New York”.  He needed a producer and off-hours host.  And, if I was going to be in New York, we could certainly talk.

As luck’d have it, I pointed out, I would indeed be in New York – in about ten days, in fact.

We set up an interview.

That was three.

Certainly – certainly – something would pan out.

It had to.

It was Wednesday, October 5, 1988.

You might be looking back the last year or so of this series, and noticed a bit of a pattern; Mitch deals with issue with his druggie/sex-addict roommate, goes to work at one crappy bar or another, and pines endlessly for something that was just out of reach. You might even think it’s getting a little stale.

And you’d be right. It certainly felt that way twenty years ago.

But things were so close to changing.

After a year and a half of focusing my job search on radio stations and jobs where I might reasonably think I could have a chance at a job – hosting at smaller and mid-market stations, or producing at bigger-market operations – my unexpected success at landing an interview in New York led me to try a bolder approach. I tried a few more wild leaps.

A week or so earlier, I called WOR Radio in New York – sort of the WCCO of Manhattan, at the time.

I got through to the program director. He asked for a tape.

I followed up today. And he liked it.

“If you’re ever in New York…”

Ahem.

“I’m actually going to be in the city the week of October 16th…”

“Great!”

We set up an appointment.

That was two job interviews in New York.

Certainly one of them had to connect. Right?

So does anyone out there in the greater Saint Paul area have a drum sander, or a really oomph-y orbital sander, that they could rent or lend to an area blogger for a day?

It’s for a new recipe.

No, not really.  I have a floor or two to refinish – and all of Menards’ rental sanders are broken and unavailable.

I love the smell of poly in the morning.  It smells like…

…a hangover when you haven’t been drinking.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Let me know.

My creation – perhaps the most perfect summer/warm weather repaste ever:

1. Small bowl of vanilla ice cream.
2. Splash a little lime juice over it.
3. Enjoy.

You can thank me later.

…I can see where things could improve even more:

Sam Whittingham is the fastest cyclist on the planet, having pedaled his sleek recumbent bicycle to a stunning 82.3 mph to claim the world record for a human-powered vehicle.

The bike-builder from British Columbia bested his previous record of 81.02 mph during a picture-perfect run through the desert during the World Human Powered Speed Challenge outside Battle Mountain, Nevada.

“On the one hand, it’s terrifying, but also completely exhilarating, Whittingham, who’s won the competition every year since its inception six years ago, told the Vancouver Sun after taking home the $26,748 deciMach Prize for Human-Powered Speed. “It’s like going down the steepest hill you can find on your bike, but you get to do that all the time.”

That bike plus Ramsey Hill = world of fun/hurt/whatever.

…I did oversleep this morning!  Why do you ask?

My customary 5AM blogging didn’t happen – so output is going to be a little sparse until lunchtime.

Feels like old times!

It was Monday, September 19, 1988.

I called Charlie, the program director at the station in New York. He took my call – always a good sign.

“So – you said to stop by if I was ever in NYC. And I was actually going to be passing through the week of the 17th of October…”

“Great!”, Charlie said. He checked his calendar. He was going to be out of town on the 17th and 18th – but he’d be in on Thursday the 19th.

He gave me the address – just south of Central Park.

And so it was set.

I drove to the travel agency and checked for a cheap ticket for the week of October16th.  And found one.  Real cheap.

Thankfully.

I still wasn’t sure if this was a good idea.  But I mentally crossed my fingers and wrote out a check.

Start spreading the news…

It was Monday, September 12, 1988.

I’d been settled into the new digs, over in Swede Hollow, for almost two weeks.

It was pretty friggin’ awful. Wyatt was…well, Wyatt, only moreso. More women. More booze. More ugly scenes; Teresa had this unfortunate knack of catching Wyatt with other women, lately. It’d always boil into a huge fight, with screaming and smashing things.

I tried to spend most of my days out and about the city – biking, walking, whatever, just to stay out of the house until it was time to come home, clean up and get to whatever bar I was working. There was some good news, there, anyway; I’d gotten a bit of a raise, and they were putting me in some other bars. Not necessarily “better” bars, but other ones, bars that, unlike Jams and City Limits, I wasn’t bored stiff with yet. At least, not individually. All the bars were more or less the same; Silks in Woodbury, Mingles in Brooklyn Park, Websters in Bloomington, Shooters in North Saint Paul, the White Bear Inn in White Bear, Whispers in Minnetonka, J.P. McPicklesh***ers in Burnsville…

…oh, wait. That was from The Onion, as a spoof of that same kind of dismal bar with its atmosphere of contrived fun covering a veneer of Bergmanesque emotional barrenness.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Anyway – lots of bars. The sleazy DJ service loved me because they could put me into any kind of bar – R’nB, rock, biker, country, boring, what have you. So I went into all of them.

My other solace? Maybe, just maybe, getting my radio career back.

I called Charlie, at WMCA in New York. “Yeah, I like your tape!”, he said – five words that almost stopped my heart. “Y’know – it’d be great if you could stop by in New York sometime. We might have a need coming up, and I’d like to talk with you about it”.

Go to New York?, I thought. That’s crazy. I can’t afford that.

“I think I might actually be coming out to New York fairly soon on…other business”, I vamped.

“Good”, said Charlie. “Tell you what – keep me posted. I’d love to meet”.

I hung up, and started looking for cheap airfare. As it happens, I’d never booked an airline ticket before.

It was Thursday, September 8, 1988.

Wyatt and Shane and I had moved to the big, tumbledown house in Swede Hollow the previous week.

Wyatt quickly claimed the big upstairs bedroom. The other two were kinda…well, crummy.

I saw that the front living room had a couple of pull-out partition doors that could be pulled out and hooked shut to become walls. I claimed that one; Shane was happy to claim the other two.

The good news: the living room had plenty of room for me, my “desk” (an old banquet table) and a big, beautiful stained glass window and looked out on the street. The bad news? The street was a crummy little ditch lined with decrepit buildings largely full of drug dealers and lowlifes.

Like, I guess, at this point of my life, me.

I had a nice thick curtain, too.

I settled in.

…light posting today.

I should be back to relatively-normal tomorrow.

It’s going to be a busy, crazy, and fraught day.

Nonspecific (for the moment) prayers, karmic imprecations ori other best wishes acceptable to your worldview are eagerly solicited.

UPDATE 1:50PM – They were answered. It was “yes”. Thanks, everyone (even you, Penigma. 🙂

Indeed, that’s one of the lessons of this fracas; you never know where your friends are going to come from.

More later, once I sort it all out.

That’s very enigmatic, isn’t it?

It was Wednesday, August 17, 1988.

After I turned down the apartment on York Street, it was time to get down to business; we had two weeks to find a place for the three of us to live.

And not a day went by where I didn’t have a bad feeling about my decision. While Wyatt had a brief stretch of relative sobriety, it was always more a matter of situational tactics than a change in lifestyle. He dried up enough to get a job with an asbestos-abatement company. “I’ll be able to pay some of the back-bills I owe”, he said, not-all-that-convincingly.

But as soon as the checks started coming in, he started hitting the bottle again.

And while he was a fairly jovial drunk, most of the time, you could see bits and pieces of ugly leaking out. He’d yell at someone, smack one of the dogs…the usual alcoholic stuff.

The worst? The day after I called the guy who’d offered me the apartment, Teresa – Wyatt’s gorgeous “girlfriend” – came over during the day, unannounced. Wyatt, of course, had another girl – a west-side Mexician girl named “Rosa” – over.

I was down in the basement working on some project or another in the early afternoon; Teresa walked in, and apparently caught Wyatt and Rosa in flagrante. First came the yelling. From where I sat, it sounded like Teresa actually got the better of Rosa, who walked out (or so I heard from the footsteps). Then the real fight, with thrown laps and scratching and kicking and a little actual bloodshed, started. I heard six feet walking out the door above me; Teresa had apparently taken one of the dogs.

Wyatt came ambling down the stairs a few minutes later – until he got to the bottom of the stairs. Then he broke into a run out the door. From the basement, I could hear the screaming on the front lawn; Teresa had apparently keyed Wyatt’s car before she left.

I thought briefly about calling the guy on York to see if the apartment was available. I figured there was no chance…

At any rate, we found a house for rent in the Pioneer Press; a three-bedroom frame out in Swede Hollow, on the East Side. The house was on an impossibly-narrow one-way street, surrounded by dilapidated houses with people sitting out on the porches; bullet holes stitched the walls of at least two houses. The whole enterprise smelled like “crack neighborhood”. But it was three bedrooms, no garage, $500 a month. I think the landlord liked the fact that we didn’t look like Section Eight or crack dealers; he offered us the place on the spot.

I walked away from the meeting relieved to have a place, but not really feeling good about the whole thing.

It was Monday, August 15, 1988.

I called the guy with the apartment – the affordable, gorgeous apartment with the $275/month rent in the not-tops-but-who-cares-I’m-6’5-and-have-a-gun neighborhood…

…and told him I was gonna find a place with my roommates.

I think it was the commitment of jumping my rent $100 a month higher, looking back.

But I do remember that I knew almost instantly it was a very bad idea.

My friend Sloan Skjellerup is finally blogging; “A Gal’s Gotta Vent“.

And lordy, does she ever. I hope she gets around to writing half of the stories I’ve heard from her…

It’s no wonder I hear banjos when I drive into Isanti County.

It was Sunday, August 14, 1988.

Our landlord – the crazy guy who’d tried to start a group home for victims and perpetrators of sexual abuse under the same roof – had tired of our complaints about sewage leaking into our kitchen cabinets and refrigerators that made better crock pots, and decided to terminate our lease on the first of September.

The landlord was as inept as a property manager as he was a therapist – and, as it turned out, his day job wasn’t much better.  He ran a hardwood floor refinishing business.  Wyatt, Shane and I went to look at a place – a lower-duplex in Frogtown.  We noticed the finish on the floor stopped a solid two inches shy of the wall moulding.

We all started laughing.  “Did [landlord’s name] do this finishing job?”

“Yes”, said the landlady, a rather irritated looking black woman. 

We all guffawed. 

We didn’t get the place.

The guys – Wyatt and Shane – thought the three of us should get a place. “No kidding”, I thought. Shane was making like $4 an hour and couldn’t afford much, and Wyatt no doubt figured it’d be plenty cheap sharing a house with a couple of guys who’d cover him when he skipped his bills. Which was frequently.

Although at least he’d caught the utilities up – once we heard the landlord was kicking us out.

So we started shopping for places.

And so did I. Part of me figured “I gotta get out of this place”. I could sort of afford a place of my own – as long as it was cheap. Part of me figured “what difference does it make?”, and thought I might as well stay with Wyatt and Shane.  As miserable as it was sharing a duplex with a guy whose drinking, pot-smoking, womanizing and bill-skipping was getting pretty much out of control, it was cheap; I’d been paying $166 a month in rent, plus generally $40 a month in utilities (more if Wyatt skipped out), plus $50-100 for the phone, depending on how many radio stations I called that month.  I was bringing in about $800-900 a month after taxes.  Not horrible, but not good.

Today, I was having an “Option A” day. I’d picked up a Sunday Pioneer Press this morning, and found an interesting-looking place.  I made a call, and drove over around noonish on a gorgeous Sunday.

It was on the East Side, over on York street, by the big Rainbow Foods store that serves as the home away from home for every schizophrenic in the east metro.

But it was nice – a newly-remodeled one-bedroom in a six-plex, with a small but new kitchen, a nice living room with a sliding window opening on the patio, and a bathroom of my very own (!) – for $275 a month plus phone.

The landlord liked me. “I’ll knock money off the rent for shoveling, fixing things, calling the handyman or the dealers if there’s something you can’t fix, that sort of thing.  You’d sort of be a building manager”, he said. “The place is basically yours if you want it”.

I was thrilled. I told him I’d call back tomorrow. Might as well not appear too eager, I thought – not quite realizing that that only applied to jobs, not apartments.

I turned the thought over in my head as I drove home to get ready for work. Nice place. I’d be alone – which I loved! But $275…

I kept on thinking.

It was Tuesday, August 9, 1988.

I was getting irrationally exuberant.

After my “success” the previous week getting the program director at WMCA in New York to actually ask me for an audition tape – and it was a success, in its own way – I started thinking big.

I called WOR. Perhaps it was the confidence that comes from irrational exuberance, but I got through to the Program Director.

He was a nice guy. We chatted for a bit. He, also, asked for my audition tape.

Wow.

I dug through the book a little more, and found another talk station, up in White Plains.

I had no idea where or what White Plains was, but I called.

He wanted a tape too.

Whoah.

…that Bun came into the world after about a zillion hours of labor (not that I’m the one to complain about that).

Seventeen?

No way.

(Checks calendar).

Wow.  No kidding.  Seventeen.  Yowza.

Happy Birthday, Bun!

I saw John Stewart at Night Writer took the “Idiot Test“, and figured I had to give it a shot:

I am less than 0% Idiot.

Intelligence rolls off of me like fog off a lake in the early morning.  But be careful; if I ran into a Daily Kos diarist, there’d be an intellectual matter/anti-matter reaction, and  we’d both flash out of existence.   

Take the
Idiot Test
@ FualiDotCom

  Not bad, I tells ya.

This one (Via Anti-Strib) is on ones’ White Trash level:

I am 0% White Trash.

I, my friend, have class. I am so not white trash. . While Democrats consider themselves the paladins of class, I outclass them by superhuman margins. Not only do I not drink wine from boxes, I frequently bypass bottles and go directly to the vintner’s cask. I radiate class to the point where I am able to refine classlessness by simple exposure to me.

Take the
White Trash Test
@ FualiDotCom

It was Friday, August 5, 1988.

I’d been job-hunting almost a year and half.

I had called – or at least tried to call – every talk radio station in the United States, or at least every one I could find evidence of.

With a few exceptions.

I figured there were a couple of markets into which there was no chance in hell I’d land; Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Philly, and of course New York. Maybe I could get a producer gig – but even those, I figured, would hardly be worth the effort.
I was working in bars. I was living with a stoner sex addict and a speed metal singer. I was in a house where sewage oozed from the ceiling, and the landlord couldn’t be bothered.

I woke up this morning, and figured “what do I have to lose?”

I opened up my ratty, disintegrating copy of the SRDS, and called WMCA Radio in New York – a talk radio station.

To my amazement, I got through to the program director.

I did my patter. It was a short conversation…

“Send me a tape”, he said.

…but a good one.

Exhilarated – and not really expecting much – I picked out an audition tape, typed up a cover letter, and biked to the post office.

I actually had a spring in my step as I drove out to City Limits that night.

Since time immemorial, I’ve set this blog to display the most recent 20 posts.  When it was just me doing the writing, that was usually enough to keep 4-5 days’ work on the front page.

Now, with two fairly prolific guys working on the blog, it means that stuff I published Friday is already falling off the bottom of the blog.  After a weekend, mind you – when I rarely post, and Roosh usually slows down.

So for the first time ever, I’m going to crank up the number of posts on the front page.

Newspapers: Shrinking.

Shot In The Dark:  Growing.

Invest accordingly.

Dan’s a high school classmate of mine; we played in a band together (he played bass). For a variety of reasons, I’m going to withhold the last name; if you went to Jamestown High School back then, you know who I’m talking about.

Anyway – today is the ceremony marking his promotion to full bird Colonel in the USAF, part of a 22-year career that saw him flying fighters over and around all the world’s hot spots, first with the Navy and then, after 9/11, with the Air Force.  Talk about hot rod collectors – he’s flown F18s and F16s.

Anyway – best wishes, Dan!  Does this mean you’re giving F16 rides at the 30th reunion?